It's an odd rallying cry for petition gathering — help us, help you raise your taxes. But that's just what Liberal Loon Carol Hedges did in a recent email blast where she urged her big government backers to help get Rollie Heath's Initiative 25 onto the November ballot. The measure, if passed, would raise taxes $3 billion over five years through jacking up the state sales tax 3% and the state income tax 8%. To get on the ballot, they must collect 86,000 valid registered voter signatures, meaning to be safe they probably have to collect double that amount.

With a recent independent study predicting up to 119,000 jobs could be lost ifthe measure passed, we doubt there are over 150,000 Coloradans willing to sign onto the measure. It struggled to gather signatures even among the tax hike crowd in the Capitol, with virtually no Democrat politician willing to take a stance on the measure. That lack of Capitol crowd support makes us doubt passersby at King Soopers or even Boulder tea shops would be ecstatic about adding their name to the list of supporters.

The Loon is of course rallying to Rollie's side now as part of their tax hike compromise we wrote about in March. The deal was The Loon would drop her permanent massive tax hike and in return Rollie Heath would push a temporary, but still job-killingly large, tax increase. We have to admire the pluck of the email though, trying to make it sound like fun gathering signatures:

"So beginning this week and continuing through end of July, we will be holding Friday petition parties. On Friday, from 9 to noon we will gather at the Colorado Center on Law and Policy offices to accomplish the clerical work that needs to be done for our petitions to be formally submitted to the Secretary of State's Office."

As anyone who has ever gathered signatures knows, it is anything but a party. We seriously doubt they will find many volunteers willing to be yelled at by pedestrians and threatened by store managers, all in the name of a tax hike that has basically no chance of passing. This fact means that the email is really more about messaging, making it seem like volunteers will drive the measure to the ballot, rather than paid mercenaries used to being abused in grocery store parking lots in exchange for $7-8 a signature.

We wonder whether they'll find 86,000 valid signatures. Then again, when spending Pat Stryker's pocket change, there is probably no question that the Left's mercenary signature collectors won’t find a way to get it to the ballot.

That’s why we spend 40% of the state budget on K12 education. That’s far too little. While we’re at it, why don’t we kill 30,500 jobs too? That way we can have a well-educated workforce for other states to recruit.